Book Review - Corvus: A Life with Birds

Corvus: A Life with Birds by Esther Woolfson is a beautifully and lovingly written memoir. After receiving a few doves, Woolfson and her family soon take in a variety of wanted, unwanted and fallen baby birds including a cockatiel, rook, magpie, starling and crow to become members of the family. Woolfson understands both the costs and benefits of keeping some of these wild birds at home, but takes the time to understand and love these birds as best she can, especially the Corvids. The book itself is a mixture of her personal stories mixed in with natural history of the birds species. She researches the way they are portrayed in culture compared to their nature and personal quirks. She pulls you into her world, describing the sometimes minute details of the birds and their behavior, putting a smile on your face or tears in your eyes at the appropriate moment to make you feel something a bit more for some of the few wild animal we still interact with regularly when outside.

I must admit that I have a fascination with birds, so this book was especially relatable and touching to me. I grew up with a parrot at home, who is the closet thing I'll ever have to an older sibling, so I understood some of the relationships being described of man and bird. I also know a couple people who have had crows before and seem to gush with the same sort of love that Woolfson does. Although this book doesn't have such an intense "green" leaning, I would still recommend this book to anyone interested in birds, understanding the relationship between man and other animals, nature or if you need a little bit of light reading between some of those more intense environmental books.




birds, Solvang, CA 2007

Review: Skid Row

The first time I ended up in the Skid Row area, it wasn't on purpose. I didn't even realize I was there. I was driving to a concert at the smell, an odd venue with the entrance in an alleyway on the edge of skid row. I was in the general area, but couldn't see any addresses or signs and was having problems finding parking. I kept on driving, searching, looking for the destination. Eventually I realized there weren't many cars around, but there were tons of people in tents all over the sidewalks, people wandering in the streets, yelling at me.
At another point someone ran across the street with a gun in their hand. After spending most of my time in California in Claremont, I was somewhat terrified, but I had to give someone at the concert a ride home. I tried calling the radio station I volunteered at to find out more info about the venue, but no one knew anything and no one answered the phone at the venue. I made it to the concert alive that night, eventually. The following concert were all fitting for the night (the artist said the smell was their favorite venue to play because of the atmosphere!) but I've had various, less terrifying, but more intentional experience with Skid Row since then.

This past week I came across a documentary called Skid Row, "starring" Pras Michel of the Fugees. Essentially Michel lives on Skid Row for 9 days with a body guard under cover, $9 and a tent, discretely filming a documentary of life on skid row. Michel has to deal with still trying to maintain his normal self in the atmosphere and realizes that in some ways, the living situation changes your person. They seemed to have picked one of the few rainy periods each year in the Los Angeles area, bringing more drama into the documentary including rats running around due to their homes being flooded. Although the footage is a bit jumpy at times, the film accurately shows what I've observed while walking around Los Angeles. The random seeming altercations, people clearly under the influence of hard drugs, the debris, the tents and rats and gatherings. They don't really interview or show any individuals clearly suffering from major mental disorders. It's worth watching if you are at all interested. It can't bring the smell and chaos or make you feel the same way as walking past many people living in this situation does, but it does prepare you for the experience to some degree.

One reason I bring this up is that living in a more car-free manner in Los Angeles and means dealing with more homeless individuals. Just this afternoon while on a bike ride I saw a guy urinating in the Universal City Metro parking lot with a limo parked nearby. A little further up the street in front of an apartment building, a guy smelling strongly of alcohol was laying in the bushes. Many people in cars just put up their window and keep looking straight ahead. I've been on the train when someone gets on, smelling strongly of urine, sweat and whatever other things collect on clothing and the rest of the people on the car gather down on the other end, but you can't help but to notice the homeless individuals' shuffle and that they must be suffering in some physical way. I've seen the same woman rant loudly about Jesus and her husband and Satan on the trains and staying at bus stop after bus stop in my neighborhood, talking to no one in particular. I've seen children innocently getting into conversations with some homeless individuals only for the child to be completely confused once the homeless individual starts talking about something unrelated or something that isn't there. As the Gold Line leaves Union Station, there are various sites visible on both sides of the tracks that are common gathering places where I've seeing rats running around and trash piling up. A couple of weeks ago I saw a woman standing in the LA river near downtown with a t shirt on, washing her pants in the river. One thing I found to be so difficult is seeing so many extremely poor and extremely wealthy people living so closely in a city. I've heard people covered in all sorts of sores with densely tangles hair talking eagerly to one another about where they would go to get drugs once they got off the Red Line at Pershing Square. While some people are going through things in life that live them few other options, some people make decisions that someone leave them in this situation. It's hard to keep your eyes closed and ignore it when it's in front of you though once you start moving throughout the city without a car. That's why I was torn when I saw the guy taking the recyclables out of the recycle bin last week.

Book Review - The Organic Food Shopper's Guide

The Organic Food Shopper's Guide by Jeff Cox, a former editor for Organic Gardening Magazine is a straightforward book that gives one information on the basic components of a healthy organic diet. The book begins by explaining what it means for good to be considered organic. This includes an explanation of the wordings you might see on food labels in the U.S., how pesticides, compost, genetic engineered foods fit in with organics and some information on how grocery stores must handle organics.

The rest of the book is divided into 6 sections on vegetables, fruits, nuts/seeds/grains, herbs & spices, meat/fish/dairy/eggs and kitchen staples. Each has a similar structure in that foods in that category are organics in alphabetical order. Each food has it's own section with information including:
-when the food is in season
-notable varieties of the food
-how to pick out the best/ripe foods
-how to store and prepare the food
-major nutritional highlights
-complimentary foods/flavors
-general information on the food
-the "organic advantage"
-uses
-recipes featuring each ingredient

Some of the information in this book is truly interesting. I had been searching on information about eating wild fennel I see all the time while hiking and this book finally told me what parts were usable. Some of the organic advantages were interesting, but some of the reasons were a little weak and repetitive when reading from the beginning to the end. The end of the book includes a list of resources to buy organic varieties of the food, mostly through the internet.

Even for someone like me that's been visiting the local farmers market for years and cooks nearly every meal at home, there was some new information in this book for me on ingredients I just wasn't sure about. I'd recommend this book for anyone that is just learning to cook at home or becoming more interesting in whole food and organic food cooking. I don't know if I'd read this book from beginning to end, but it's a good reference book. I could see using it as a compliment to discovering new farmers market foods, especially here in California. This book is also a bit refreshing in that you don't feel as if there are hidden motives in this information.

Review for Garbage Warrior

The movie Garbage Warrior follows a man named Mike Reynolds. Reynolds went to school and studied to be an architect. Once he finished, he realized that the school he just went through missed an excellent opportunity to teach people how to create buildings with the future in mind. They needed to deal with water shortages and the wasting of resources, but they weren't. Being a stubborn man, he decided to try to fix it himself and provide an example for everyone else to follow. He set out on constructing houses out of reused materials like glass bottles, aluminum cans, tires, dirt and adobe. He wanted the house off the grid and to be self sustaining. The result was the Earthship.

"You couldn't worry about what it looked like, you just wanted it to work"

Since Reynolds was exploring nontraditional ground for American architecture, he also did a large amount of experimenting. This unstandardized approach brought him issues however. His self designed, eco friendly neighborhoods and homes violated countless laws that city of Taos, New Mexico had in place. So he sets out to comply with the laws and then sought permission to have an experimental community, similar to the resources the government puts into testing out a weapon.

The documentary covers this story and shows you countless examples of these amazing, unique structures and introduces you to some of the people learning the techniques themselves. The houses are easy enough to construct that the process can be taught with relative ease to people in countless situations using the available resources. Because they take advantage of what is available, they are also generally much cheaper to construct than a normal home.

Some people might be turned off by the design of some of these buildings, but if you have any sort of ecological leaning or are interested in sustainable housing, I am pretty sure this documentary can be inspiring to you.

Review for Go Green by Nancy Taylor

Title: Go Green - How to Build an Earth-Friendly Community
Author: Nancy Taylor
Published: Jan 2008
Other: Printed on recycled paper

The first thing that struck me about this book was that it simply looked different than most books. It had a soft back, but was made completely out of matte (not shiny) recycled paper, has rounded corners and the whole book is printed with an aqua colored font. I do a large amount of my reading standing on the train and I found the book to fit easily in the palm of my hand while holding it open with the other.

The book begins with a simple call to action. You are seeing there is climate change occurring, something must be done about it. This book has some easy steps and ideas to get yourself and your community going in that direction. The author covers a variety of basic topics including saving energy, building remodeling and green buildings in general, transportation, food and water. Each chapter is a quick read at 20 pages or less. Each briefly explains the things that are targets of attention and why these behaviors are causing some issues. She then explains some easy steps and ideas to get yourself and other thinking about what can be done. The chapters then conclude with a list of action points. Some ideas are for the home while others are definitely more long term projects that take the support of a group of others in your community.

I would recommend this book to people looking to get into more green living. It is a good place to start for ideas for action, but is just an introduction. This book has the advantage of being more than a blurb from someone trying to sell you their "green" item while still not jumping full into a history of garbage in the U.S., for example. After picking a topic, to really get some of these projects going I'd do more research.

Human Footprint Review

Yesterday I had a chance to watch the National Geographic program Human Footprint. The idea was interesting and tied into a line of interest I've been exploring: a visual representation of what an American (not a Human) consumes during their average lifetime of 77 years and some odd months.

It follows the life time of a boy and girl, showing what they consume during their entire life at various times in their life. For example, it starts out showing you what raw materials go into make diapers and then how many diapers a child will wear in their lifetime. It's pretty overwhelming and at this point I began wondering if they would then compare other, less wasteful methods to these seemingly wasteful methods. They mention washing cloth diapers and then tell you how much water you use for washing, and nothing else.

At this point I started getting a little confused about what the real message of the movie was. Should we stop wasting? What should we use instead of disposable or cloth diapers? What is an acceptable level of usage? They continue on displaying the total number of various food items you will consume over the average lifespan, but it left me wondering what I should be eating instead of meat, eggs, bread, diary and fruits. I didn't really know what some of the numbers meant and even for someone like me that likes numbers, my eyes kinda glazed over. They overwhelmed you by actually showing you what you consumed ( like the 55 loaves a bread you'll eat each year). It left me wondering what they did with all of those loaves of bread they spread all over the ground to allow me to visualize how many loaves I will consume in my life (they didn't waste them, did they?), meanwhile causing me to ask which bread-like items I consume are included in these numbers. Only real loaves? Rolls? Buns? Croissants? Do these numbers include what people buy or what they actually do use themselves? I don't even know what they movie is trying to say anymore except to overwhelm you massive numbers of things.

I think after seeing Manufactured Landscapes recently, the attempts at using the same imagery of a super close up to a long panning shot to show me plastic ducks representing showers was a little boring. That isn't to say nothing in this movie was interesting. At one point I was completely disgusted to see that maraschino cherries are bleached before being dyed red. They stated that the average American drinks 43,371 cans of soda in their lifetime. That is 556 sodas a year for all 77 years and 8 (or something) months of one's life from birth. That is about 1.5 sodas a day and there are people like me that rarely drink soda. The average American reads 6 books a year.

Eventually, towards the end, they remind you to do things like turn off your lights and unplug appliances and other tips. For the first time my thought that this show has some point appears, but I still wasn't sure what to make of the beginning. I don't know if they wanted to say "hey stop having children" or "eat more vegetables".

It wasn't that the information isn't potentially useful, but the way it is displayed it is difficult to reach many conclusions. I think it would have been better in small parts than as 1 long 90 minute show on dvd. Watched in one stretch it just became overwhelming and lost some of the impact. I wish they explained where these numbers came from because while they were impressive, it sometimes reminded me of the information that comes to you in quick tv news segments or online news stories. It makes a big impact, but taken completely out of context has no meaning.

Manufactured Landscapes Review

Earlier this week I finally had an opportunity to watch another of my library finds, Manufactured Landscapes. I would quickly recommend it to anyone. I think one of the reasons I was so drawn to this movie was how much it reminded me of the Salton Sea at times. It's beautiful yet a disaster.

The first thing I was struck by was the method of photography and how it creates so much space that is simultaneously claustrophobic. The opening shot of row after row of boxes and people working at stations in a Chinese factory seems endless. I can't even tell what the people are working on and it's strangely quiet. I don't think I realized and thought about how much is hand assembled.

I thought I could maybe finish cooking dinner while watching this movie, but I quickly discovered that wouldn't be possible. This movie demands too much attention.

This movie looks at various man made and man destroyed areas in Asia. It helps complete the story of what happens to all of those hazardous waste items when they are recycled. We have to take them to special places and not dump it in the normal trash, yet they end up being dismembered and recovered by people, not some crazy technology. It shows people paid to destroy their own villages in preparation for large dam construction. This is primarily done through images rather than words. The photography alone is worth watching and for once I wished I had a larger tv.


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